The Mighty Viking

Tonight‘s Viking Sacrifice:  the gods of our own making.

In the center you can see the right side of the horned helmet of what we assume is a god of fire.  Some of us would serve him, and create a mythology to fit.  It is comforting to be able to create around you a storyline that matches our desires, that compliments the things we think we‘re best at, and punishes those things that irritate us.

But these gods are born of falsehood.  A higher power than ourselves inherently comes from beyond us, from a place where we sacrifice of ourself, not those things we consider expendable.  We do not choose our sacrifice.  We simply choose to sacrifice it when it is required of us.

A True God focuses on an ultimate standard, universal truths, and requires of us that we mold to it, not to our whims and fancies.  

A true God commands a certain sense of humility from us, not through the thoroughly human trait of thirst for dominance, but simply because of his reminder to us that the Standard simply IS, and that we‘ve got some work to do.

An invented god of human origin plays to the catch-phrases of the day, the fads of thought, of ego, and of fear.  

We create scary gods when we wish to control and manipulate others.  We create kind gods when we wish to please ourselves.  And because the True God is a God of silence, of the quiet, innate Truth with no motive but love of His Creation, we fill the silence with our own ambition.

We can see this process at work watching children play together.  They invent games – and often you hear them adding rules to the game that help them win.  It is only when a parent steps in, whose interest is in the longer view of well-balanced children than the outcome of today‘s game, that rules get set right.

And so we sacrifice our little god of fire, with his horned, helmeted, cloaked fearsomeness.  And the god of Worldly knowledge – the knowledge of how to be cool, of street creed, and hipness, the suave swagger.  And the god of wealth.  And the god of Social Consciousness.  And the god of other people‘s business, and the god of independence, of self-sufficiency.  We have many gods to sacrifice.  And holding them close is exactly what stands in the path of Truth.

All we need is a God of Truth.  Truth compels us without malice, or prejudice, Truth has no mechanism for taunting us.  Truth does all the things Love does.  There is no need to fear it.  There is no need to placate or patronize it.

And more importantly, it has no need to placate us.